Doesn't matter how unlikely it is in infinite time it's gonna happen a lot.
Yep. But the chances are ten-to-the-googleplex to one that all that gets temporarily created in the fluctuation is your brain
Sure, but in given infinite time and space, anything that can happen WILL happen. Up to and including the spontaneous creation of a massive, persistent universe. In fact, that tremendously unlikely universe will occur not just once, but an infinite number of times.
Which is why I, personally, don't believe in the existence of infinity.
The way I parse it, "thing" is being used here to describe everything that can be understood by the scientific method, and to exclude everything which is not quantifiable. Which makes a tight, circular argument of "science is the study of things that can be studied by science."
Science is the practice of studying nature with narrowly defined tests of its behavior and properties. Things that cannot be tested (or at least, proven wrong) are not science. That said, things that cannot be tested are still a meaningful part of human experience - but that just goes to say that science isn't the only thing that humans can experience, and that there are realms of human experience that science can't address directly.
I think that you've essentially articulated Deism, which was en vogue around the time of the American Revolution. It's got a lot more going for it than the personal god, santa clause theology that's dominant in Christianity today, IMO. And it's an interesting concept to play around with - what if an enormously powerful but still limited being defined the laws of the universe and then set it loose? It would explain some of the impressive elegance of the physical laws we know about, and perhaps some of the statistical surprises that underlie certain cosmological constants, etc - although of course, plenty of perfectly mundane explanations are available for everything we've observed in the universe thus far.
I don't know anything about the Tao, but I will wager that it doesn't make any falsifiable claims. Which means that it isn't an explanation for anything, and has no bearing on the big bang. It might still have meaning in the sense that any art or philosophy or religion can be meaningful to a person, but it doesn't have anything to do with astrophysics.
The Big Bang is not an alternative to God anymore than evolution or plate tectonics would be. It's the current leading theory about how one particular cosmological age played out. God's existence is neither implied by or refuted by the big bang - the two issues are completely orthogonal.
Now, if you want to discuss WHY there was a universe in existence in which a Big Bang could happen, that's where you can invoke deities or philosophies or theology or whatever you want - you've left the realm of fact and experiment, and entered the land of handwaving and magic.
I'm a fan of municipal fiber but the breathless tone of the piece is a bit over the top. It's a good idea, but San Francisco shouldn't congratulate itself too much - Longmont, CO has had fiber to the home for quite some time, and I'm sure there are other cities as well. Early subscribers enjoy $50/month for 1Gb up and down, and if I remember right it's only $70 for the later subscribers. Beats the snot out of the Comcast / Centurylink duopoly.
Once you find good and evil always relative, anything is acceptable.
And people who are full of absolutist certitude can often justify anything in the pursuit of their goal. Intellectual humility fosters doubt, though, and doubt causes scrutiny, and scrutiny means that you're thinking about your actions.
People like Weinstein are good at rationalizing - and you can rationalize from a perspective of moral absolutism (it's ok to murder him because he's a heathen) or from a perspective of relativism (if it feels good, do it). And the cold, hard truth is, people often do the wrong thing. Including movie execs, preachers, and every other profession under the sun.
The kinect has always been a smoking deal, and has enabled some really cool robotics research that otherwise wouldn't have been possible without a $20k outlay for laser rangefinders of comparable speed and resolution. Thankfully, things have gotten much cheaper in that area since the kinect first came out, but it's still a sad day for the amateur/low-cost robotics crowd.
Here's the rebuttal - adding school choice and breaking up unions has failed to produce better results. Charter schools are designed to address all of these problems, but in fact, perform slightly worse on average than public schools: http://www.data-first.org/ques...
This is despite a large advantage from selection bias.
Overall, your anti-union, anti-public sentiment seems to be driven by ideology, not evidence.
When it happens it's because one party has identified exactly how many votes they need and bussed voters to a polling place to vote 'one more time' just before the polls close.
There is ZERO evidence of this happening at any kind of scale. Voter fraud like this would be pretty easy to detect, and in independent studies is happening in tiny, tiny numbers, if at all. Spreading these kinds of rumors is toxic to democracy. Think about what you are doing.
Making a tough business deal, and outright nuking tens of thousands or millions of people are two very different things, and Trump knows that.
Citation needed. Every time Trump has gotten even vaguely near the nuke topic, it has been a disaster. He claimed he can learn everything there is to know about nuclear missiles in an hour. When asked about the topic, he goes on bizarre tangents about a smart uncle. After meeting with nuclear security experts, many of them expressed grave concerns about his temperament and ignorance on the topic. All of the existing evidence suggests that Trump is both ignorant about nuclear weapons and impulsive in the extreme - about the most dangerous combination you could ask for.
Citation needed. What evidence do you have that schools with unions do worse? Really, I'm curious, because despite this being repeated ad-nauseam by conservatives, destroying unions has somehow failed to usher in a glorious new age of education.
If a classroom is organized, it is likely that students could have a better chance to get something (if teachers can teach well).
Could we allow teachers to throw chalks? Timeout chair? These ancient techniques may work. Is there any high tech tool helpful?
The data suggests otherwise - pre-k programs are one of the very few policies for which a statistically significant improvement in student outcomes can be observed. Also, classroom management techniques are pretty well developed, but they require trained, experienced, skilled teachers to implement. We often can't get that caliber of professional with the substandard pay and teacher training programs we offer.
The main problems with schools is that there is little flexibility and competition. Teacher's unions slap down any real innovation and oppose any form of family choice. Lots of kids simply do not learn well with "traditional", large-class, 6-period, lecture-style, standardized-test type education.
Citation needed. Charter schools, which ostensibly offer more choice, flexibility, and innovation, do not perform any better than public schools on average, despite having a massive benefit from selection bias. Show evidence to support your anti-union claims or GTFO.
Start by figuring out how to make advanced learning something kids will strive for vs something they shun to avoid the persecution and misery that usually comes with it.
Sure, but how you do this?
Russia had some success at this via propaganda promoting scientists and engineers as the ideal role models. Finland has managed this by turning teaching into a highly admired profession (advanced degrees and good pay for teachers were the solution). There may be other options out there. But pointing out the problem is the easy part - coming up with solutions is the real challenge.
ugh can we stop telling this bald face lie about teacher pay!
While there are a few pockets in this country where teachers are under paid the national average pay rates for public school teachers are only slightly below that of work requiring similar educate with other fields.
This might be true for people with degrees in English, history, or similar. For anybody with STEM skills, though, it's a different story. I taught science for a year, and now make about 4x my former teaching salary, using those same exact technical skills.
Nobody has time to watch a bunch of youtube links. Articulate the arguments yourself, or at least summarize, if you want to participate in the conversation.
Figures for average teacher pay and average professional pay vary widely, so take these figures with a grain of salt, but it is obvious to see that teachers make a very competitive wage.
This depends on the state, school, and the point in a teacher's career. Salaries at the end of a teaching career can be ok, but they are often laughable to start out. I taught for one year, as a high school science teacher. My base salary was $26k. I changed to engineering, and now use those very same technical skills to make about 4 times that income, 4 years later. That's frankly ridiculous, considering that to teach high school physics well requires at least as much skill as any of the engineering jobs I've done.
Pay is not the whole problem, but in some places at least, it is a huge contributor. If you want a job done well, you need quality people, and in basically every aspect of life, people acknowledge that you will only get the talent that you're willing to pay for. Teaching is no different, but because of politics people like to pretend otherwise.
"Special education" is frequently exorbitantly expensive, more expensive than one full-time tutor per student (easily over $100,000 per year). The return on investment is zilch, and certainly not a responsible use of taxpayer money. If a child's mental potential is limited to basket weaving, spending 12 years in a futile effort to teach him to read does no good.
At least you're honest about your desire to cull the weak from the herd. You're right that special ed is tremendously expensive, but many of the students that enter into these programs have physical handicaps, not mental ones. Look at Stephen Hawking for perhaps the best example of how special education students can succeed academically. Additionally, for many of these students, an education is the difference between a life collecting disability and a life of contributing to society at a basic minimum wage job.
Regardless of the fact that providing education to all yields a very tangible public benefit, it's also simply the right thing to do. What do you recommend as an alternative? Shuffle the disabled away into asylums? Euthanization? Let them starve on the street? Or just plan that they will be dependent on government handouts for their entire lives and get them started early? You really only have a handful of options available, all of which have been tried in various places and times. Using public education to give each individual a fair chance at self-sufficiency seems to be the obvious choice from a perspective of liberty, equality, and social good, not to mention simple decency.
I would love to see your attempt at a rebuttal, both for the entertaining mental gymnastics and so we can observe exactly how atrophied your moral compass has become.
Ok, so debunk the physical events in Seveneves. I've had only two conversations about it, with competent astrophysicists, and they weren't willing to call BS on any of it.
I'll second this. Seveneves might have some faults, but it actually does a hell of a job with scientific plausibility. Except, you know, the moon asploding.
"The guy who wrote the simulation did it" is much like "God did it", an answer that is scientifically unacceptable. Hacking the simulation and/or finding some cheat codes would appear as supernatural abilities. We've got a feel for the overall nature of physical laws, and so know something about the style of the guy who wrote the simulation.
Well, the only thing that's lent any credence at all to the simulation theory is that a whole lot of quantum mechanical behavior seems eerily similar to the various code optimization techniques. The idea of the observer effect, where certain aspects of the universe "don't exist" in a classical sense when they aren't being looked at, and the fundamental resolution limits that are implied by the Planck length and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, all are deeply provocative, non-classical concepts and they also have analogues in code optimization.
So, it's certainly conceivable that a grand theory of simulation could predict other quantized phenomena that we could test, or suggest some previously unknown methods for taking advantage of the limitations or peculiarities of a simulated universe. You can argue that "God did it" isn't all that different from "Quantum effects did it" to the layperson - the difference is that there's a very specific and mathematically defined model underlying one of those claims, and playing with that model can tell us things that we don't already know. If "the sim did it" gave us a useful mathematical model of the universe with some predictive power, it would be not just good science, but revolutionary.
That said, the simulated universe is quite an extraordinary claim and I don't think any of us really believe intuitively that it could be true. This paper articulates at least one very good, mathematical reason that it probably isn't.
Oh sure, from a personal perspective. But from a scientific perspective, if we were able to gather increasing evidence in support of the simulation theory, potentially that could bear lots of fruit in terms of theoretical physics, and of course, the most interesting question would be whether we can hack the simulation from inside of it, and what consequences and possibilities will ensue if we can.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't matter how unlikely it is in infinite time it's gonna happen a lot.
Yep. But the chances are ten-to-the-googleplex to one that all that gets temporarily created in the fluctuation is your brain
Sure, but in given infinite time and space, anything that can happen WILL happen. Up to and including the spontaneous creation of a massive, persistent universe. In fact, that tremendously unlikely universe will occur not just once, but an infinite number of times.
Which is why I, personally, don't believe in the existence of infinity.
The way I parse it, "thing" is being used here to describe everything that can be understood by the scientific method, and to exclude everything which is not quantifiable. Which makes a tight, circular argument of "science is the study of things that can be studied by science."
Science is the practice of studying nature with narrowly defined tests of its behavior and properties. Things that cannot be tested (or at least, proven wrong) are not science. That said, things that cannot be tested are still a meaningful part of human experience - but that just goes to say that science isn't the only thing that humans can experience, and that there are realms of human experience that science can't address directly.
I think that you've essentially articulated Deism, which was en vogue around the time of the American Revolution. It's got a lot more going for it than the personal god, santa clause theology that's dominant in Christianity today, IMO. And it's an interesting concept to play around with - what if an enormously powerful but still limited being defined the laws of the universe and then set it loose? It would explain some of the impressive elegance of the physical laws we know about, and perhaps some of the statistical surprises that underlie certain cosmological constants, etc - although of course, plenty of perfectly mundane explanations are available for everything we've observed in the universe thus far.
I don't know anything about the Tao, but I will wager that it doesn't make any falsifiable claims. Which means that it isn't an explanation for anything, and has no bearing on the big bang. It might still have meaning in the sense that any art or philosophy or religion can be meaningful to a person, but it doesn't have anything to do with astrophysics.
The Big Bang is not an alternative to God anymore than evolution or plate tectonics would be. It's the current leading theory about how one particular cosmological age played out. God's existence is neither implied by or refuted by the big bang - the two issues are completely orthogonal.
Now, if you want to discuss WHY there was a universe in existence in which a Big Bang could happen, that's where you can invoke deities or philosophies or theology or whatever you want - you've left the realm of fact and experiment, and entered the land of handwaving and magic.
I'm a fan of municipal fiber but the breathless tone of the piece is a bit over the top. It's a good idea, but San Francisco shouldn't congratulate itself too much - Longmont, CO has had fiber to the home for quite some time, and I'm sure there are other cities as well. Early subscribers enjoy $50/month for 1Gb up and down, and if I remember right it's only $70 for the later subscribers. Beats the snot out of the Comcast / Centurylink duopoly.
Contrary to what the media will tell you, racists are proud of being racist.
So you don't think there are people out there who discriminate based on skin color but won't admit it publicly?
Once you find good and evil always relative, anything is acceptable.
And people who are full of absolutist certitude can often justify anything in the pursuit of their goal. Intellectual humility fosters doubt, though, and doubt causes scrutiny, and scrutiny means that you're thinking about your actions.
People like Weinstein are good at rationalizing - and you can rationalize from a perspective of moral absolutism (it's ok to murder him because he's a heathen) or from a perspective of relativism (if it feels good, do it). And the cold, hard truth is, people often do the wrong thing. Including movie execs, preachers, and every other profession under the sun.
Frankly, homosexuality is a greater evil than theft.
Why?
The kinect has always been a smoking deal, and has enabled some really cool robotics research that otherwise wouldn't have been possible without a $20k outlay for laser rangefinders of comparable speed and resolution. Thankfully, things have gotten much cheaper in that area since the kinect first came out, but it's still a sad day for the amateur/low-cost robotics crowd.
Here's the rebuttal - adding school choice and breaking up unions has failed to produce better results. Charter schools are designed to address all of these problems, but in fact, perform slightly worse on average than public schools: http://www.data-first.org/ques...
This is despite a large advantage from selection bias.
Overall, your anti-union, anti-public sentiment seems to be driven by ideology, not evidence.
The hours long queues is largely a myth.
When it happens it's because one party has identified exactly how many votes they need and bussed voters to a polling place to vote 'one more time' just before the polls close.
There is ZERO evidence of this happening at any kind of scale. Voter fraud like this would be pretty easy to detect, and in independent studies is happening in tiny, tiny numbers, if at all. Spreading these kinds of rumors is toxic to democracy. Think about what you are doing.
Making a tough business deal, and outright nuking tens of thousands or millions of people are two very different things, and Trump knows that.
Citation needed. Every time Trump has gotten even vaguely near the nuke topic, it has been a disaster. He claimed he can learn everything there is to know about nuclear missiles in an hour. When asked about the topic, he goes on bizarre tangents about a smart uncle. After meeting with nuclear security experts, many of them expressed grave concerns about his temperament and ignorance on the topic. All of the existing evidence suggests that Trump is both ignorant about nuclear weapons and impulsive in the extreme - about the most dangerous combination you could ask for.
Citation needed. What evidence do you have that schools with unions do worse? Really, I'm curious, because despite this being repeated ad-nauseam by conservatives, destroying unions has somehow failed to usher in a glorious new age of education.
And I believe universal pre-K will fail for sure.
If a classroom is organized, it is likely that students could have a better chance to get something (if teachers can teach well).
Could we allow teachers to throw chalks? Timeout chair? These ancient techniques may work. Is there any high tech tool helpful?
The data suggests otherwise - pre-k programs are one of the very few policies for which a statistically significant improvement in student outcomes can be observed. Also, classroom management techniques are pretty well developed, but they require trained, experienced, skilled teachers to implement. We often can't get that caliber of professional with the substandard pay and teacher training programs we offer.
The main problems with schools is that there is little flexibility and competition. Teacher's unions slap down any real innovation and oppose any form of family choice. Lots of kids simply do not learn well with "traditional", large-class, 6-period, lecture-style, standardized-test type education.
Citation needed. Charter schools, which ostensibly offer more choice, flexibility, and innovation, do not perform any better than public schools on average, despite having a massive benefit from selection bias. Show evidence to support your anti-union claims or GTFO.
You want to fix education ?
Start by figuring out how to make advanced learning something kids will strive for vs something they shun to avoid the persecution and misery that usually comes with it.
Sure, but how you do this?
Russia had some success at this via propaganda promoting scientists and engineers as the ideal role models. Finland has managed this by turning teaching into a highly admired profession (advanced degrees and good pay for teachers were the solution). There may be other options out there. But pointing out the problem is the easy part - coming up with solutions is the real challenge.
ugh can we stop telling this bald face lie about teacher pay!
While there are a few pockets in this country where teachers are under paid the national average pay rates for public school teachers are only slightly below that of work requiring similar educate with other fields.
This might be true for people with degrees in English, history, or similar. For anybody with STEM skills, though, it's a different story. I taught science for a year, and now make about 4x my former teaching salary, using those same exact technical skills.
Nobody has time to watch a bunch of youtube links. Articulate the arguments yourself, or at least summarize, if you want to participate in the conversation.
Figures for average teacher pay and average professional pay vary widely, so take these figures with a grain of salt, but it is obvious to see that teachers make a very competitive wage.
This depends on the state, school, and the point in a teacher's career. Salaries at the end of a teaching career can be ok, but they are often laughable to start out. I taught for one year, as a high school science teacher. My base salary was $26k. I changed to engineering, and now use those very same technical skills to make about 4 times that income, 4 years later. That's frankly ridiculous, considering that to teach high school physics well requires at least as much skill as any of the engineering jobs I've done.
Pay is not the whole problem, but in some places at least, it is a huge contributor. If you want a job done well, you need quality people, and in basically every aspect of life, people acknowledge that you will only get the talent that you're willing to pay for. Teaching is no different, but because of politics people like to pretend otherwise.
"Special education" is frequently exorbitantly expensive, more expensive than one full-time tutor per student (easily over $100,000 per year). The return on investment is zilch, and certainly not a responsible use of taxpayer money. If a child's mental potential is limited to basket weaving, spending 12 years in a futile effort to teach him to read does no good.
At least you're honest about your desire to cull the weak from the herd. You're right that special ed is tremendously expensive, but many of the students that enter into these programs have physical handicaps, not mental ones. Look at Stephen Hawking for perhaps the best example of how special education students can succeed academically. Additionally, for many of these students, an education is the difference between a life collecting disability and a life of contributing to society at a basic minimum wage job.
Regardless of the fact that providing education to all yields a very tangible public benefit, it's also simply the right thing to do. What do you recommend as an alternative? Shuffle the disabled away into asylums? Euthanization? Let them starve on the street? Or just plan that they will be dependent on government handouts for their entire lives and get them started early? You really only have a handful of options available, all of which have been tried in various places and times. Using public education to give each individual a fair chance at self-sufficiency seems to be the obvious choice from a perspective of liberty, equality, and social good, not to mention simple decency.
I would love to see your attempt at a rebuttal, both for the entertaining mental gymnastics and so we can observe exactly how atrophied your moral compass has become.
Ok, so debunk the physical events in Seveneves. I've had only two conversations about it, with competent astrophysicists, and they weren't willing to call BS on any of it.
I'll second this. Seveneves might have some faults, but it actually does a hell of a job with scientific plausibility. Except, you know, the moon asploding.
Still waiting for slashdot to post an article about the growth rate surpassing 3% as described in that nasty conservative rag USA Today:
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
That 3.1% growth was higher than anything under Obama, as confirmed by far, alt-right Nazi organization politifact:
http://www.politifact.com/illi...
Oh snap, they're MSM and left wing hacks respectively
Is that news for nerds, stuff that matters? This story is marginal, and that one would be no better.
"The guy who wrote the simulation did it" is much like "God did it", an answer that is scientifically unacceptable. Hacking the simulation and/or finding some cheat codes would appear as supernatural abilities. We've got a feel for the overall nature of physical laws, and so know something about the style of the guy who wrote the simulation.
Well, the only thing that's lent any credence at all to the simulation theory is that a whole lot of quantum mechanical behavior seems eerily similar to the various code optimization techniques. The idea of the observer effect, where certain aspects of the universe "don't exist" in a classical sense when they aren't being looked at, and the fundamental resolution limits that are implied by the Planck length and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, all are deeply provocative, non-classical concepts and they also have analogues in code optimization.
So, it's certainly conceivable that a grand theory of simulation could predict other quantized phenomena that we could test, or suggest some previously unknown methods for taking advantage of the limitations or peculiarities of a simulated universe. You can argue that "God did it" isn't all that different from "Quantum effects did it" to the layperson - the difference is that there's a very specific and mathematically defined model underlying one of those claims, and playing with that model can tell us things that we don't already know. If "the sim did it" gave us a useful mathematical model of the universe with some predictive power, it would be not just good science, but revolutionary.
That said, the simulated universe is quite an extraordinary claim and I don't think any of us really believe intuitively that it could be true. This paper articulates at least one very good, mathematical reason that it probably isn't.
Oh sure, from a personal perspective. But from a scientific perspective, if we were able to gather increasing evidence in support of the simulation theory, potentially that could bear lots of fruit in terms of theoretical physics, and of course, the most interesting question would be whether we can hack the simulation from inside of it, and what consequences and possibilities will ensue if we can.